The pending closure of a Unilever soup plant in Brampton at a cost of 280 jobs became a flashpoint in the Ontario election campaign Thursday.

On a day opposition leaders highlighted their job creation measures — including a Progressive Conservative push for more skilled trades — the NDP’s Andrea Horwath said the shutdown slated for 2016 demonstrates Kathleen Wynne’s government has “no plan to keep jobs here.”

“The maintenance of good jobs is something the Liberals have failed miserably on,” Horwath charged at the Covent Garden Market in London after reviving her 2011 election promise for job creation tax credits.

Unilever, which makes soups under the Knorr and Lipton brands along with sauces and gravy in Brampton, said the plant needed a substantial investment to keep pace with changes in the industry.

With 80 per cent of the plant’s production being shipped to the United States, the company will consolidate production at a facility in Independence, Mo.

“I would certainly be in the door with the executives that are operating that plant and talking about what we can do to ensure that those jobs stay,” Horwath said.

Liberal MPP Deb Matthews, who serves as Wynne’s deputy premier and represents London North Centre, was shadowing Horwath’s campaign appearance and told reporters the Ontario economy remains in transition.

“I was curious to hear whether the NDP had any solution for that company . . . I don’t think they had one,” added Matthews, who also served as Wynne’s health minister.

“This is not easy and no politician is going to be able to snap their fingers and fix the problem.”

Horwath said earlier in the day in Niagara Falls that her revamped plan to give companies a tax credit of $5,000 each new hire could create 170,000 jobs over two years.

She touted it as a better way to boost employment than the millions in grants Wynne’s government has doled out to companies with “no strings attached.”

But Horwath admitted there are no guarantees in her $500 million plan.

“I believe that . . . once someone has been in the job for a year the likelihood that someone who’s now trained, who knows the workforce, who’s very familiar with the job, becomes a valuable asset to that employer,” she told reporters at an auto parts logistics plant.

“And that employer will keep that person on the job.”

The Liberals have repeatedly rejected the plan, with Matthews saying “it is paying for jobs that would have been created anyway.”

His plan includes reducing the apprentice-to-journeyman ratio to one-to-one mentoring and scrapping the Ontario College of Trades, which he says is unnecessary bureaucracy created by the Liberals to set apprenticeship ratios he considers too high.

“It’s hard to believe in a time like this that we actually have artificial and politically motivated roadblocks to getting more young people into the skilled trades,” Hudak said Thursday in Vaughan.

He charged that Pat Dillon of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario is pulling the government’s strings on the college, which charges a registration fee for trade workers that is a “tax grab.”

Dillon is a frequent target of Hudak, given that he was a player in the Working Families Coalition of unions that has run third-party attack ads against the Tories for over 10 years.

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